July 5, 2014
It was only Brian, so she didn't bother covering herself up before she buzzed him through. There was no point, really; he'd seen it all before, and the display on the monitor showed her that no one else was loitering about the corridor this early in the morning, that there was no risk of anyone else seeing something they shouldn't. Let Brian see; he'd hardly be shocked. It wouldn't be the first time he'd caught her like this.
Like this, fresh from the shower with her hair damp and curling riotously around her shoulders, stark naked and standing in front of the floor length mirror on the far side of her bedroom. At this time of the morning no one else was up and about; Noah had woken early for breakfast but he'd not slept all the way through the night, had just gone back down for a nap, and the girls weren't likely to rise before noon. This time was her time, quiet and peaceful, perfect for contemplation, however maudlin that contemplation might have been.
"See something you like?" Brian called to her softly as he crossed the room, his heavy boots leaving soft indentations in her fine carpet. His eyes were fixed on the vision of her body in the mirror, but he wasn't leering. The expression he wore was more appreciative than anything else, the expression of a tourist wandering through a museum full of fabled artworks he didn't quite understand but nonetheless venerated.
"Couple of things I don't," she said ruefully.
It wasn't the crow's feet that had sprung up at the corners of her eyes that bothered her, or the veins on the backs of her hands, or the single grey hair she'd found in the shower this morning; on the whole there was very little about her appearance she took objection with. A lifetime in the business of selling beauty had given her an eye for it, and she wasn't a fool. She knew what she looked like, and she was proud of it. Her body, her self, she didn't mind, liked, even. It was what had been done to her and the evidence it left behind that she could hardly stand to look at.
"It's not so bad," Brian said, stepping up behind her and resting his hands tenderly on her shoulders, careful not to touch her anywhere else. "You're healing, Liv."
The physical wounds had healed long ago; the deeper wounds had been inflicted on her very soul, and she wasn't sure they were healing, not really. But when she looked in the mirror it was the physical marks she saw, the burns that had turned red and shiny, dotted across her tits, her belly, the outlines of keys on her hip, on her thighs, the long, thin marks of a razor slashed haphazardly across her skin. There weren't so very many of them, not really; one was too many, but it could have been worse. It could have been worse, that's what she kept telling herself, tried to make herself grateful that the dose of horror she'd received was not as much as others had been given, though it was nearly enough to break her in half.
"The fucker's dead," Brian reminded her. "And you're still here. And you're still gorgeous, babe."
Still, she thought, despite. Her body, her face, these things had been her currency for decades now, and Lewis had defiled them, defiled her, on purpose. Added insult to injury by making her damaged goods. No one would want a marked up whore; he'd told her that himself before he burned her the first time.
"They're not so bad," she forced herself to say. "I've been marked worse."
In the clear glass of the mirror she watched it happen, watched Brian's eyes drift away from the reflection of her face to the vision of her back just in front of him. What he saw there she couldn't say, not really; she'd seen drawings of it, and caught glimpses of it in the mirror, and felt every sting of the needle, but she'd never looked at her tattoo head on, as he was doing now, had never seen the whole of it for herself from the angle from which it was intended to be viewed. There was a time when she'd wanted to see it, but no more.
"Sometimes I forget it's even there," she mused.
"Liar," Brian said, giving a quick grin to soothe the sting of his accusation.
"Fine," she conceded. She was never gonna forget about the mark, not really. "There are some days I don't think about it, how's that?"
"Better," he allowed. "I know you hate it -" and god, did she ever hate that fucking tattoo - "but it's…it's kind of beautiful."
Maybe it was. Maybe it had hurt her too badly for Olivia to ever see the beauty in it. The first time she'd seen the drawing of it she'd been only sixteen years old, and she'd nearly puked, thinking about having that thing on her back for the rest of her life. She was older now, and wiser, and the mark had been with her longer than anyone or anything else. It didn't make her sick, anymore; now it only made her sad.
It was a bird - a phoenix, according to Liz - a great black bird in flight, his tail feathers curling over the cheeks of Olivia's ass, his lithe body winding up the length of her spine, his proud head ending at the base of her neck with feathers trailing up it, his wings spread across her ribs up to her shoulders. It was huge, and every inch of it had been paid for in blood and sweat and tears, and it had hurt. But all that pain, all that sorrow, was in the past now, only the memory of it lingering on her skin.
"Sometimes when you breathe it looks like he's flying," Brian told her.
When they'd met all those years ago the bird had been nearly finished, and Brian had seen the progression of it. It was Brian who'd started referring to the bird as he, rather than it, Brian who had with his childlike sense of whimsy made the mark a living creature, instead of just a tat. Sometimes she wanted to hate him for that; sometimes she dreamt of black birds scooping her up in their talons, carrying her away in the night, and she reckoned that was his fault. Brian was the only person in her life now who'd known her before the thing was finished, though, and that made him dear to her, whatever she might blame him for.
"Sometimes I wish he would," she said. "Sometimes I wish he could. Wish he'd just fly away." And take me with him.
"Come on," Brian said with a softness she knew he reserved for her and Noah, never showed to anyone else. "You're bumming me out. Let's talk about something else."
Her black robe was draped over the chair at her dressing table close to hand, and so he reached for it, wrapped it carefully around her shoulders, hid the phoenix from view and let her pull the robe closed in front to cover her scars.
"What do you want to talk about?" she asked as she shook her hair out from underneath the robe, gave her face a final once-over in the mirror. It was too early in the day for makeup; she'd deal with all that later. Brian wouldn't faint at the sight of a wrinkle.
"You really gonna put mics in the girls' rooms?"
So that's what he'd come to talk to her about. She'd been wondering.
"Elliot thinks it's a good idea."
"Oh, well, if Elliot thinks it's a good idea -" Brian pronounced the name like a curse, and Olivia frowned, turned slowly around to face him head on.
"If Sinatra and Kosta are using those rooms to plot something I want to know what it is."
"What happened to this business depends on discretion, huh? What do you think the clients are gonna say when they find out they don't have the privacy you promised them? That you're giving tapes to the cops? Jesus, Liv."
The truth was Olivia didn't plan to be around to witness the fallout from Elliot's investigation herself. What the clients thought when they found out there was a rat in their midst, that the madam had been enabling him, was of very little concern to her, seeing as she fully intended to be several states away when the news broke. But Brian didn't know that part of the plan - not yet, anyway - and she'd have to be a little smoother, have to play her cards just right, to avoid arousing his suspicion further than she already had done.
"Who said I'm gonna give the tapes to him?" she asked archly. "We'll put mics in there, and we'll listen to the tapes, and then we'll decide what to do with them. Sex sells, but information is better. Come on, Bri, you know that."
Oak House dealt in secrets almost as much as in flesh, and whatever secrets Sinatra and Kosta were keeping were surely worth their weight in gold.
"You're smart," he said. "I know that. But just…promise me you won't lose sight of who the real enemy is, ok?"
By that he meant Elliot. He thought Elliot was the enemy, because Elliot was a cop, and a danger to the business. Olivia knew something Brian didn't, though; the real enemy was the business itself, and Elliot was…she didn't know what he was yet, but she knew what she wanted him to be. She knew that when she'd cradled him in the corner, his body pressed hard to hers, his breath soft against her neck, she'd felt something for the first time in years, something that wasn't fear or rage, something she'd thought she'd forgotten how to feel. Elliot had reminded her how to want, and she wasn't ready to let it go, not yet.
Despite their fervent allegiance to the country of their birth the Albanians had thrown a hell of a shindig for the Fourth, and no one was looking for Eddie Ashes come Saturday morning so he carted himself down to the 1-6, stopping along the way to pick up a bagel and a coffee for an old friend.
"Thanks, Munch," he said as John unceremoniously dropped the cardboard evidence box on the table in front of him.
"Dare I ask why you even want to see this?" Munch drawled, taking a long swig from his coffee cup.
"Better not," Elliot said.
"In that case, I'm going to go enjoy my breakfast. Let me know if you need anything. And don't take anything, all right? I checked the inventory sheet before you got here and I'll check it again when you leave."
"Scout's honor," Elliot promised.
Munch grunted, and left him, and Elliot raised the lid on the box, and began to dig through the contents inside.
He didn't want to look; he had to look. Thus far he'd managed to keep his curiosity in check, managed to respect Olivia's privacy and his own desire not to see her as a victim and kept his distance from her official records, but for the last week he'd thought of her more than anything else, and he hoped that maybe if he got some answers, maybe even just one, her face would stop haunting his dreams. The first thing he'd done was try to pull her record, but she'd never been busted for anything. That made a certain amount of sense, he figured; Oak House was supposed to be the best of the best, and there was no way the person in charge of that legacy would let her girls get busted for hooking. Olivia really must have come there young, before she had a chance to get in trouble on her own, and Oak House had protected her ever since.
Except that Sister Peg had told him Olivia had been attacked, and so he'd known that somewhere, lost in the bureaucracy of the NYPD, there had to be a file with her name on it. It hadn't taken him long to find, and he'd been relieved - and a little suspicious - to discover that the squad in charge of investigating that incident was his former unit. Did SVU really not know, he wondered, who their victim was? Had they really brushed so close to Oak House just a year ago, and never realized the powder keg they'd stepped into?
They must not have; the notes on Olivia Benson in the file identified her as a prostitute, but did not give her place of work. Maybe she'd talked too fast for them, told them she worked for herself. The address she'd given them was a fake. He'd wondered, at first, why she'd told them what she did for work at all, but the file had answered that question eventually.
The man, the one who'd hurt her, his name was William Lewis, and he was a demon. A monster in a human suit, unfit to walk the earth, made only for pain. Lewis had left a trail of devastation in his wake, raped and murdered and tortured women in multiple states, always getting away unscathed. He didn't seem to have a type, didn't prey on working girls, but he had chosen Olivia on account of her profession. The victim statement spelled it out; he'd tried to gain entry to her house, and been rebuffed, and he wasn't the sort of man to take no for an answer. He'd waited, patient, methodical, until Olivia stepped out of the house alone, and then he'd struck, taken her, held her for days, tortured her. The only thing that had saved Olivia was Olivia herself; she'd managed to break free, and beat the fucker to death with a metal bar ripped off an old bedframe. With Lewis dead and Olivia bleeding there had been no question of self defense, and SVU had let her go, satisfied that the beast had at last been brought to some kind of justice.
Elliot hadn't slept since he'd read that file, and now he was here, digging through the evidence box. There wasn't much; a gun, a necklace, fingerprint and blood analysis reports, the results of the rape kit. He paged through the results of the kit with his gut churning unpleasantly; if Lewis meant to rape her he hadn't succeeded, but Jesus, he had hurt her. There were pictures, in the file. Of the bruises on her face, her split lip. Her broken wrist, the contusions across her ribs, the burns, the cuts. He looked at those photos for no more than a minute, and then he threw them back in the box as if just holding them had wounded him.
It was no wonder, he thought, that Oak House was a fortress, that Olivia never ventured far without Brian on her heels. How could she ever feel safe enough to step outside, after something like this? But Jesus, how could she go on in this business, surrounded by sex and the casual cruelty of the elite, after what had been done to her? Maybe she didn't have any other choice. Elliot knew what that was like; he didn't have any choices, either.
The paperwork said Olivia had been discharged from the hospital into the care of one Brian Cassidy, and now that Elliot had a last name for the man his next course of action would be to look Brian up, and see what he might find there. That would have to wait, however, because at present Elliot could not move, could only sit with his head in his hands, thinking about Olivia, and the cruel hand that life had dealt her. Thinking about how unfair it was that someone as lovely, as strong, as brave as she was had been done so wrong, so many times. Thinking about how she'd freed herself from the clutches of a monster no one else had been able to stop, thinking about the sheer force of her will, and the light citrus scent of her neck. Thinking about the case, and the promises he'd made to Bell, and cops and outlaws, and the whole sorry business. They were not comforting thoughts.